


A Suggested Chronology

by urbanMystic



Category: Carol (2015), Carol (2015) RPF, The Price of Salt - Patricia Highsmith
Genre: Disease, F/F, I hope I tagged everything, Internalized Homophobia, Police Brutality, Sex Mentions, respectability politics, why didnt i just write fluff instead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-21
Updated: 2016-05-21
Packaged: 2018-06-09 17:57:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6917386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/urbanMystic/pseuds/urbanMystic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My attempt at a historically believable chronology of Therese and Carol, with a focus on Gay Rights history in the US.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Suggested Chronology

“The closet was shut so tight back then.”  
-

It is 1952 and Carol Aird is 35 years old. She has just locked eyes with a cute young lady working behind the counter, and thought not much more of it. She’s used to this, the occasional wave of surprise rolling over her. She assumes it is a one-sided, momentary attraction and says nothing.

A week later, it is still 1952 and Carol Aird is still 35 years old. Through a series of bizarre events, she is sitting across the table from one Therese Belivet, and some facts are becoming painfully obvious. The attraction is not one-sided. Therese has no idea what she is or what she is doing. However, the biggest, most painful realization of them all, floating in the smoky diner like the undertone of amber appears when Therese accepts Carol’s invitation to visit. 

Therese Belivet is too young to have heard her own silence. Carol is ponderously infatuated, not simply lusting for a body to press against her own, but awake with a tendril of new trust. Carol wants to tell Therese, to spare the younger woman the grief and confusion of what is to come, but more than that Carol wants Therese to know how to survive. Survival requires a silence.

-

It was 1938 when Abby came home three days late and covered in bruises. Carol was 20, Abby 19, and both of them knew what had happened. Police had raided a bar and found the young butch in violation of the legal dress codes, ripping her fine evening coat in their “inspection”. Abby never wore men’s clothes again after that. 

It was 1938 and Carol was cleaning her friend’s cuts, icing bruises. She was worried for Abby and oddly grateful that she was not like Abby, that she was straight and seeing a nice boy. That the stockings around her legs felt like a second skin and not the burden they were to her friend. Carol will never forget the fine posture Abby had held in that jacket, proud and polished.

-

It was December 7, 1941 when America joined World War 2. Carol was 23, Abby 22, and Therese a young girl of 6, her father freshly dead, two years away from being left at an orphanage. Harge was away at war, and Carol was truly worried whether or not her fiance would return.

-

It is 1952 and Therese and Carol are in a single hotel room together for the first time. They are already miles away from anyone who knows them. Carol has the words on her lips, the name that will call Therese into her arms, but the younger woman still has a chance. Therese can still escape this peculiar road trip and go on, unsullied, to find the happiness Carol lacked. Despite how eagerly Therese lurches forward at each of Carol’s invitations, Carol waits for her new love to take the final jump of her own free will.

-

The war ends in 1945. Harge comes home and marries Carol while she is still a smitten woman. Rindy is born in 1947. 

-

It is 1951 and Carol’s body aches. She sleeps in a separate bed from her husband. She is trotted out to party after party, and a feeling has sunk in that she is not attending for her own pleasure, but for Harge to brag about, to hide behind. He never makes love to her outside of important dates: anniversary, her birthday, his birthday. Carol is ringing hollow aside from the little hearth fire that is her precious daughter.

It is 1951 and Abby is 32. Abby is still there. Abby is sauntering easily from girl to girl, fling to fling, an expert at hiding. Carol and Abby are on a trip for a few days, just to clear Carol’s head from the ringing loneliness, and when Abby sees the flush on Carol’s cheeks she knows exactly what the trophy wife’s spirit has been missing.

Carol Aird can no longer hide. In her best friend’s arms she feels as though she has recovered a lost limb, a phantom part of her she hadn’t even realized she was missing until she found it. Now the silence that kept her with Harge is ringing in her ears, and it bears down like winter.

-

It is 5 seconds into 1953 and Therese has uttered, “Take me to bed.” Carol forgets her hesitation and guilt and loses as much of herself as she may in the scent of Therese Belivet. If there hadn’t been a microphone in the wall, you never would have heard them. Therese had seen the betrayal in Richard’s eyes. She had seen the care with which Carol asked for rooms. She knows, she had always known that she needed to be silent, but tonight she has heard her own silence. Her desire no longer lives behind the stone of the nunnery where she lived, but now behind her eyes, always watching Carol like a quiet glowing ember.

Therese shudders and shakes and gasps but not. once. Not once in the entirety of the night does she moan. Carol doesn’t register this as a fact, she is so used to the silence in her ears.

-

It was 1957 when she and Carol joined the Daughters of Bilitis, a then revolutionary group designed to help lesbians blend into normal life. It was the Daughters’ magazine, The Ladder, that suggested the concept of legal adoption to them.

In 1958, at age 23, Therese comes home to the surprise of a fancy homemade candlelit dinner that ends with Carol asking if she would like to be adopted.

-

It is 1998. Carol Aird is 80 years old and dying. Her beloved Therese is there by her side the entire time, grateful for the legal right to do so. The nurses aren’t blind and know full well that these two are more akin to wives than mother and daughter, especially with the presence of a equally blond, 51 year-old Rindy Aird. Harge is already passed, as is Abby. This leaves Carol all the more grateful that Therese, now 63, will have a rent-controlled apartment and a sizeable set of savings and investments to live on.

Therese is not expected to last long without Carol. She leads quite a happy life, actually, knowing Carol would want her to be happy, and having faith that they will meet again when the time is right.

-

It is 1953 and Ms. Belivet is three feet behind her lover in the doorway of a nowhere motel. Three feet behind a gun and ten feet from a private detective. It is the first relation of bodies that witnesses her love for Carol: not the knowing smirk of Abby’s lips, not the possessive glare of Harge’s irises, not the indirect giggles of the butches at the diner. Here Therese’s affection is laid bare by the meagre three feet between her and the unsteady Mrs. Aird. 

It was only him, who might be an invert himself, who witnessed them, who did not look away or make excuses, who stared down the barrel of a gun and saw husky kisses on bare neck for what they were. Here was the silence, the ear that followed damned women and rich men before the hammer came down. Here at the source it wasn’t silence at all but a rushing of lake winds past her ears, a dulling of other sensation, an armor of winter song, a burn that became frostbite, the white noise behind a microphone played to a lawyer.

This was the day the Silence almost took them, and they would shake for decades to come. 

-

It is 1969 and Therese Belivet is 34 years old. She has maintained her job at the Times and is now middle management in the photography department. With her experience and talent, she ought to be department head, but in 1969 the glass ceiling is a very thick thing. Therese is already having issues with some of the younger male photographers refusing to accept her position. The Daughters of Bilitis are fast realizing they have more in common with the women’s movement than with the heads of the Mattachine Society, a homophile organization for men.

It is a night so hot Therese is sure her skin is going to melt off when she gets the call. Her editor wants her to go see what the fuss is in Greenwich Village. She grabs a press pass, kisses Carol goodnight, and heads out at approximately 11PM on a Saturday.

Today is day 2 of what will be a five day scuffle against the police. Therese takes the subway to the threadbare hubcap that is the heart of the Village, and it only takes her a few moments to find the epicenter. The Stonewall Inn, a bar notoriously run by the Mafia, has been burnt from the inside out, ravaged of its liquor and jukeboxes, and is now filled to the brim with anti-riot police. Therese had never gone, but it still gave her pause to see the rickety building in even greater disrepair than usual. In front, a mass of people had gathered, most of them rubbernecking, with a couple gaggles of various queers taunting the riot police from every angle. Therese grabbed pictures from various positions, documenting the graffiti scrawled over the boarded windows and the reverent listlessness of the onlookers. 

The next day her picture would be featured with an article. She would take a copy home with her that day and look. There it was. A riot. A fight back. Something had finally been one step too far for the street kids and the scare queens to put up with, and it was this bar. It didn’t have the best liquor. It wasn’t a safe place for men to cruise, but it had the biggest dance floor. This was it: they had found a place to go dancing and it was where they would make their stand.

In the next year Therese would hear about many more orderly protests, many new gay bars, many new dance floors; and each time she felt something stir within her she would do the same thing: put on a record and ask her beloved Carol for a dance on their living room floor.

-

It is 1953 and Therese has moved in with Carol. After a few weeks of grueling work, she has a night calm enough to go with Carol for drinks. When they arrive, Carol introduces Therese as her roommate. Neither of them is upset; why would they be? Survival requires silence, and they want to survive.

-

It is 1980, and the sodomy law in New York are finally repealed. Therese is 45; Carol is a spry 62. There are drinks with friends to celebrate and dancing in their favorite corner bar, one that still has Billie Holiday on the jukebox. In bed, Carol and Therese crash together like ocean waves, a coming together they have shared countless times. Tonight, they want to lift the silence. They want to crash together with the lovers’ song they have denied themselves for 27 years.

They can’t. There is laughter, and reconciliation, and they continue in the quiet way they have built together. Carol does call out her lover’s name at her climax, a strained whisper, and that small victory feels like the world to Therese.

-

It is Oct 2, 1985. Rock Hudson has died of AIDS. Carol, now 67 and retired, has spent the better part of the last 5 years helping Abby with the caretaking they community needs. Too often, the same men who get sick are abandoned by their families. There is no one else to do the work.

Therese continues to work as a photographer, now prominent enough to sell prints in galleries to high art collectors. She had wrung her hands a lot in the last 5 years, praying Carol wouldn’t catch the illness that no one quite understood.

For better or worse, Mr. Hudson’s death will be the turning point, inspiring enough funding to create AZT in less than three years. That will barely stem the tide.

-

It is 1952. Therese Belivet is standing on a roof in a city where hardly anyone knows her name. She has nowhere to go back to, only the bustle of Richard’s family calling her sideways, but when Carol Aird looks at her and offers the first step in what will be a very long journey, she says yes.

**Author's Note:**

> Carol Aird is bisexual. Fite me.
> 
> EDIT: The Price of Salt, Chapter 7, the scene where Carol and Therese are driving to Carol's house again. Therese asks, "You mean you weren't in love?" and Carol responds, "Yes, I was, very much. And so was Harge." She also talks about Harge's emotional distance.
> 
> Also, I have probably mix-n-matched between the movie and the book. Apologies in advance for any historical inaccuracies.


End file.
